THE FILNER WRECKAGE HITS OUR TOURIST ECONOMY

Aside from the three weeks of turmoil spawned by the sexual-harassment scandal of San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, here’s another example of the wreckage of his first eight months in office: San Diego’s tourist economy.

Thanks in no small measure to the mayor’s interference in the way the city markets itself to outsiders, San Diego’s Tourism Authority now has zero dollars left in its marketing budget. The agency has had to gut its staff by 40 percent, scrap its Film Commission, disband a PR team that last year generated an estimated $31 million worth of national and international media exposure, and pull the plug on marketing teams in London and Tokyo that were deployed there after direct flights began between those cities and San Diego.

Perhaps the biggest hit is still to come. The Tourism Authority estimates that the cuts will not only hurt the local tourism industry, pegged at $18.4 billion a year, but will also deepen the hole in the city’s overall budget. With the expected drop in tourism, the authority estimates the city’s hotel room tax proceeds will be $12 million to $20 million short of projections in the current fiscal year.

“We’re effectively out of the market,” said Tourism Authority CEO Joe Terzi. “We’re going to be trying to figure out how to reach customers without any money.”

How did the Tourism Authority get into such a pickle? Two words: Bob Filner. The authority is funded through a 2 percent assessment on hotel room revenues collected by the city and turned over to the Tourism Marketing District, a private nonprofit consisting mostly of hotel owners. The legality of this assessment is being challenged in court. In November, the City Council reauthorized this deal. Filner refused to sign it, however, unless various concessions were met, including indemnification for the city should lawsuits prevail. Filner and the district ultimately signed the deal with the requirement that hotel owners sign waivers freeing the city from any liability. Since then, only about 15 percent of hotel owners have signed the waivers, which means the bulk of the funds are sitting in the city treasury, awaiting the outcome of the litigation. That has resulted in the shrinkage of the Tourism Authority’s budget from $30 million to about $5 million.

The initial delay in signing the deal is already being blamed for San Diego’s meager growth in hotel revenues for the first half of this year, trailing both Los Angeles and Anaheim.

But with the Tourism Authority now at the point where it has not only run out of money to spend on marketing, but also is barely able to sustain itself, we share Terzi’s fears that the worst is yet to come.